I am not sure if I’m reading the tone in, but this doesn’t read as the honouring obituary Heather Stilwell most certainly deserves. Heather Stilwell was an anti-abortion activist, a Surrey, British Columbia school trustee and a mother of eight, who passed away of breast cancer at the age of 66 this past weekend.

I interviewed Heather over the phone once for my story on sex selection abortion:

Heather Stilwell noticed something strange was going on in her hometown of Surrey, B.C. A school trustee for Surrey District No. 36 for 12 years now, one of Stilwell’s personal causes has been to promote literacy among kids. On her own time and her own dime, she sews bookbags for kindergartners, using wholesale or donated fabric, and stuffs them with books. The girls like Wemberley Worried, tales of an apprehensive mouse. The boys, usually anything to do with dinosaurs. She estimates she’s given out about 5,000 of these gifts since she started.

In recent years, Stilwell realized that she’d been having to make more and more of the plaid or striped bags she gives out to the boys, and fewer of the pink floral bags for the girls. More dinosaur books, fewer Wemberleys. She can’t put her finger on why, but the boy-girl ratio seems to be increasingly out of whack. “The numbers look pretty skewed to me,” she says. She’s sure of one thing: “[There’re] more boys.”

As it turns out, Stilwell is right.

I remember she spoke out on this politically incorrect topic willingly. I remember being surprised that she was happy to go on the record. So many, on such a topic, would not have been. So she struck me as being a courageous and confident lady. Very pro-woman. And very pro-life, as it turns out, though I didn’t know it at the time I interviewed her.

I’m sure she contributed to her community in countless other ways, but this was the one contact I had with her. And as I wrote above, Heather was right about her feeling that there were more boys than girls in the classrooms. So too, will history judge her right in her support of the unborn, though she may not have won the battle while she walked this earth. May her family find peace at this difficult time.

From CBC News:

A desire for anonymity is sending P.E.I. women to a private abortion clinic in Fredericton and that needs to change, says a local women’s group.

There are no abortions performed on the Island, but the procedure is publicly-funded and performed in Halifax for P.E.I. women. It costs the provincial government $250 and requires a referral by two doctors.

But one Island doctor who refers women to Halifax told CBC News some are uncomfortable with the public route because their names are on government documentation, and typically more women go to the private Morgentaler clinic in Fredericton, and pay the $600 to $800 cost out of their own pocket.

The Women’s Network says that policy needs to change.

“If fear of being identified, whether that’s by a medial professional or if it’s by a record keeper or if that information is just stored on a server somewhere on a computer, if that fear of being found out, so to speak, is there for women, some of them will refuse to access publicly funded abortion,” said network executive director Michele MacCallum.

If you really don’t care about the impact of abortion on women’s health, then by all means, let women file in and out undetected. However, if you want women to have an accurate health record for a health care provider to access they’re going to have to put their names down.

Pat Maloney at the National Post read my mind.

One would hope that in a country where there are no restrictions on abortion there could at least be a public debate — especially about a bill whose sole purpose is to protect women from unwanted abortions. Remember that there is no consensus on abortion; polls consistently tell us show that many Canadians want some limits on abortion.

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country’s abortion law. But the court did say that Parliament has the right to legislate protection of the unborn.

Even though Mr. Harper would not support such a bill, he doesn’t have to. Bill C-510 is a private member’s bill, not a government bill. The purpose such bills is to give backbench MPs from all parties the opportunity to bring forward legislation they believe in, independent of what’s on the government’s agenda.

Mr. Harper would get one vote — just like any MP — and he could vote as his conscience dictates.

The National Post has been covering the recent events at Carleton University where the students union, CUSA, has decertified the anti-abortion group LifeLine.

There is a striking parallel between what is going on at Carleton University and what is going on in Parliament.

As the Post recently stated: “The fact that these young men and women are anti-abortion should have nothing to do with whether they are worthy of coverage. This is about certain students, CUSA, acting like petty tyrants because they do not like the views of some of their fellow students. This goes against every principle of free speech. Why is there not more outrage about this?”

And why is there not more outrage about abortion debate being shut down in our Parliament? This also goes against every principle of free speech.

Think about it: why should CUSA allow pro-life students to speak out about abortion, when our political leaders won’t allow pro-life MPs to speak out about abortion? CUSA has learned that it’s okay to shut down free speech on unpopular topics.

And where that kind of thinking ends God only knows.

As a relatively new immigrant here, I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Canadian government. However, I have always been annoyed that the Harper government has been allowed to give the abortion topic the silent treatment, even to the point of making the lack of discussion an election platform.

“I have been clear throughout my entire political career I don’t intend to open the abortion issue,” he said. “I haven’t in the past; I’m not going to in the future.”

Refusing to debate any topic is wholly undemocratic and doesn’t fulfill the government’s duty to be a tool for public opinion. Maloney cleverly parallels this situation with what is happening at CUSA. She asks an important question here, why isn’t there more outrage about this violation of free speech?

You know, I have no idea what she’s talking about… And I suspect she doesn’t, either.

A friend sent me this great link. It’s a TV panel where three women discuss the choice of remaining childless. The anthropologist from Rutgers University describes having large families as littering. To be fair, she relates how some people consider having lots of children as littering. Whether or not this is her belief is anyone’s guess. Is this view of motherhood increasingly prevalent, as many Catholic commenters  suggest? I don’t know. I’m too busy tending to my litter to pay much attention to inanities of this type. I think that we will run out of affordable food and oil long before we make ourselves extinct, personally. Then only the resourceful – like children of large families who learned early how to do more with less – will survive. University professors, especially anthropologists, won’t. But I digress.

I will not be breaking any news to our readers with large families but if we were walking around with our environmental footprint hanging over our heads (à la Eeyore), each one of my six children would have a much smaller cloud than any of their friends. See, I have the dubious blessing of having  friends who are significantly wealthier than I am. I say dubious because it is the root of much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the children gallery. We are asked questions like “Why don’t we have a house in Florida? Everybody has a house in Florida!” , “Why don’t we go to Europe every summer? Everybody goes to Europe every summer!” Everybody has a ski chalet, everybody goes to Hawaii for spring break, everybody gets a car at 16… you get the picture. And hopefully, by now, you will also understand that we may drive a full-size GMC Savana but we are burning nowhere as much fossil fuel as our friends who fly to Florida for a long weekend. And I’m not even getting near the relative size of our houses per inhabitant and the new clothes we’re not buying.

In the meantime, to all our readers with large families: happy littering! Don’t mind the academics: we outnumber them.

It may surprise some of us to hear that the number one killer of pregnant women in the United States is not unsafe abortion, but homicide.

According to a March 2001 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) using death records and coroner reports, state health department researchers found 247 pregnancy-associated deaths between 1993 and 1998, suggesting that the maternal murder phenomenon is the leading cause of death among pregnant women.

This information is important when we’re considering the necessity of Bill C-510. Pregnant women, according to this research, find themselves in more vulnerable situations than women who are not pregnant. In situations of domestic violence, it is necessary then to provide pregnant women with additional support and further protective legislation. The murder of Laci Peterson in 2002 was an ignored harbinger, and Bill C-510 is an attempt to make up for 8 years of lost time and lost lives, like that of Roxanne Fernando.

“People think that pregnancy is a joyful, happy time for families. That’s not always true,” said Phyllis Sharps, an associate professor at The Johns Hopkins University’s school of nursing who researches violence against women.

In some cases, the woman has been abused for years, and the violence escalates to murder after she’s pregnant. In others, pregnancy itself sparks emotions that can lead to murderous rages.

“Violence in intimate relationships is all about power,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she’s pregnant. She’s vulnerable. It’s an easier time to threaten her.”

In an attempt to educate and raise awareness, the Elliot Institute created this UnChoice Pop Quiz that provides statistics on coercion prior to abortion. Those who oppose Bill C-510 fear that it will negatively affect abortion providers. In my opinion, it’s more important to save women’s lives than to consider the risk to abortion providers.

I’ve been trying to figure out what happened with Apple ceasing to make the Manhattan Declaration app available. I’ll be the first to say it isn’t a great app (I have it) but then again, neither was the Smurfs’ house building game, which I downloaded late one night thanks to a bout of insomnia. Neither app was offensive to me.

Seems to be that some activists lobbied Apple to have the Manhattan Declaration app removed because they found it offensive. For those who didn’t sign it, the Manhattan Declaration is an ecumenical statement of faith, “a call of Christian conscience” on three major points: life, marriage and, ironically, religious liberty.

Whether or not you could have signed the Manhattan Declaration itself, I’d recommend signing the petition to have the app reinstated. I just hope it doesn’t come to some sort of boycott. I really love my iPhone.

This is a very interesting article about the Pill. It describes how the Pill deceives women, in spite of being applauded as this great liberator. The author describes, rather factually, how the Pill denies women very concrete information about our cycles and how our bodies work. It deceives some women into thinking they have no physical problems with their cycle, when in fact the Pill merely masks symptoms, and any underlying physical problems remain. Finally, it gives women a false sense of confidence that their fertility will last forever. The good news is that many women are catching on to the deceit:

…[W]omen are half-consciously rebelling against the artificiality of the Pill’s regime. Removal from one’s true biological processes was more appealing in the Mad Men era, when machines were going to save the world and pills could fix everything, even the ennui of housewives. But for the wheatgrass-and-yoga generation, there’s something about taking a pill every day that’s insulting to one’s sense of self, as an accomplished, adult woman. “I feel like I’ve gotten a message over the years that the less I have to do with the nitty-gritty biological stuff of being a woman, the better, and that’s a weird message,” says Sophia, 35, who was on the Pill for fourteen years. “In my ninth-grade health class, I remember the teacher saying, ‘You can get pregnant any day of the month, so always use protection,’ and I kind of knew that wasn’t true, but because I was on the Pill, I never really cared about finding out the right answer. The Pill takes a certain knowledge away from you, and that knowledge is empowering.”

One weakness of the article is that it tries to say there are no physical side effects, which isn’t true, but then, this article is more about the cultural side of how the Pill affects women’s choices. Worth the (long) read, particularly when we have some public health nurses and doctors declaring the very best thing we can do is get every teenage girl on the Pill.

Apparently, having kids later in life increases stress levels. Funny: I thought having kids, period, might increase stress levels. What do I know, eh?

According to a new U.S. study, delayed marriage and childbearing lead to increased stress for men and women. Delaying marriage and having kids means that the biggest family demands often fall at the same time that career demands are great, especially among the well-educated, while it increases the chance one’s parents might start to have poor health and need help, before the children are fully grown. American moms are participating in the labour force at a greater rate, the study found, doing 22.6 hours of paid work on average in 2008, up from 18.8 in 1985. At the same time, mothers increased the time they spend on childcare to 13.9 hours a week from 8.4 in 1985, but housework time went to 17.4 hours from 20.4. They spent less time on self-care, too. Fathers have increased working hours from 35.7 in 1985 to 39.5 in 2008, and have upped the time they spend on childcare from 2.6 hours per week in 1985 to 7.8 hours today.

Phew, that’s a lot of numbers. Not sure it means as much as all that, but what the heck, let’s play along. Especially with the “less time spent on self-care” bit. Is this a fancy way of saying busy moms don’t have time to shave their legs as often as they’d like?

Also: Notice, if you will, the increase in the number of hours dads spend on childcare. Then look at their hours worked (at a job, I mean). Both are up. But we mostly worry about moms being overworked (this particular article being an exception to the general rule). Why?

The vote on Rod Bruinooge’s bill banning coerced abortion will be on December 15, I believe. Here’s some of us who support it:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yri-9bzbJg”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yri-9bzbJg]
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Update: There is a bunch of video clips here, and ideas on how to support the bill, too.